Forming of complex shaped steel parts is associated with working at high temperature in multi station presses. The material requires heating, shearing and forming with aid of a very large and expensive forging equipment. In order to give cost efficiency such methods require high production volumes and as few resetting operations as possible. The hot forged products have a poor accuracy and require a lot of machining after the forging process for obtaining the desired final shape. To enable machining, it is in many cases needed a soft annealing operation. After soft machining of the product thus formed a heat treatment operation is needed for causing the product to reach the desired hardness. These earlier known processes can be described as expensive and they have low flexibility, which means long lead times.
Attempts of forming metallic components with use of a thixo-forming process, i.e. where the metal is heated to a semi-solid state, before the forming step, have proven to give formed products with a material microstructure, which is so uneven, and a surface integrity, which is so poor, that the product is not useful for most purposes.